Table of Contents

Acknowledgements page -- Director's Foreword -- Map -- Before the Portraits: Burial Practices in Pharaonic Egypt/John Taylor -- Graeco-Roman Portraiture/Kurt Gschwantler -- Mummy Portraits and Roman Portraiture/Susan Walker -- The Fayum and its People/R . S. Bagnall -- Technique Eupkrosyne/C.D oxiadis -- The Discovery of the Mummy Portraits/Morris Bierbrier -- A Note on the Dating of Mummy Portraits/Susan Walker -- CATALOGUE -- Portraits and Mummies from Hawara -- Gilded Masks from Hawara -- Portraits from er-Rubayat (Philadelphia) -- Portraits from Antinoopolis and other Sites -- Portraits of Technical Interest -- Pagan Icons -- Portraits on Painted Plaster Masks -- Stone Funerary Stelae 4 -- Portraits of the Later Third Century ad from Deir el-Bahri and Antinoopolis -- The Cultural and Archaeological Context -- Jewellery -- Papyri 15 -- Portrait -- Select Bibliography 6 -- Glossary -- Egyptian Deities and Chronology -- Lenders to the Exhibition and Photographic Acknowledgements -- Concordance of Catalogue and Museum Numbers.

About the Author

Susan Walker is Deputy Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the British Museum. Her publications include Greek and Roman Portraits and Roman Art.

Reviews

When Rome conquered Egypt, two great cultures combined, taking some of the best qualities of each to form an amalgam. The Egyptian belief in the afterlife held strong appeal, but so did the Roman practice of portraiture. As a result, portrait painting was added to traditional Egyptian funerary practices to produce the unique and haunting "mummy portraits," some of the earliest portraits still in existence. The first "ancient faces" exhibit appeared at the British Museum in 1997. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to do its own version, it expanded on the original core group of portraits by adding material from European and North American collections. Walker, deputy keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, edited the catalog for both shows. Consequently, they are very similar in most respects; five of the seven essays in this volume appeared first in the British catalog. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries not owning the British catalog.--Mary Morgan Smith, Northland P.L., Pittsburgh Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.